donald trump awaits sentencing in hush money case.

A New York judge is expected to say Friday when former President Donald Trump will be sentenced for falsifying business records to cover up a “hush money” payment to an adult film star.

Trump has twice sought to delay sentencing after his conviction in May by a unanimous jury on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

He was originally scheduled to be sentenced on July 11, but Justice Juan Merchan pushed back that date to Sept. 18 after Trump motioned for the judge to set aside his conviction. Trump cited a Supreme Court ruling that former presidents have immunity for “official acts,” and evidence related to presidential work cannot be included in criminal trials.

Merchan has said he’ll rule on Trump’s request to set aside the jury’s verdict just two days before the currently scheduled sentencing, on Sept. 16.

In August, Trump asked that the sentencing date be pushed back further — until after the presidential election. Trump’s lawyers said another postponement would give his team time to appeal if Merchan rejects their request to set aside the conviction.

While waiting for Merchan’s decision, Trump also pursued another path to delaying sentencing. He asked a federal judge to take over the case, claiming it belongs in federal court. The federal judge rejected that request Wednesday, and Trump appealed.

On Thursday, a lawyer for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg informed the appeals court that Merchan will issue his decision on sentencing tomorrow.

“The judge has now informed the parties that the decision will be rendered tomorrow,” Bragg’s lawyer wrote.

Prosecutors said Trump signed off on a scheme to hide reimbursements to a lawyer who wired a $130,000 “hush money” payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels days before the 2016 presidential election. Trump denied the encounter and pleaded not guilty.

Merchan has wide leeway in determining Trump’s sentence. The charges carry a maximum sentence of up to four years in jail, but this is Trump’s first conviction, so Merchan may also hand down a sentence that involves a variety of alternatives to incarceration, including probation.

A federal judge on Tuesday swiftly rejected Donald Trump’s request to intervene in his New York hush money criminal case, spurning the former president’s attempt at an end-run around the state court where he was convicted and is set to be sentenced in two weeks.

U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein’s ruling — just hours after Trump’s lawyers asked him to weigh the move — upends the Republican presidential nominee’s plan to move the case to federal court so that he could seek to have his conviction overturned in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling.

Trump’s lawyers challenged the decision, filing a notice of appeal late Tuesday in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Trump and his lawyers “will continue to fight to move this Hoax into federal court where it should be put out of its misery once and for all,” his campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, said in a statement.

Hellerstein, echoing his denial of Trump’s pretrial bid to move the case, said the defense failed to meet the high burden of proof for changing jurisdiction and that Trump’s conviction for falsifying business records involved his personal life, not official actions that the Supreme Court ruled are immune from prosecution.

In a four-page ruling, Hellerstein wrote that nothing about the high court’s July 1 ruling affected his previous conclusion that hush money payments at issue in Trump’s case “were private, unofficial acts, outside the bounds of executive authority.”

Hellerstein sidestepped a defense complaint that Trump’s state court trial had been plagued by “bias, conflicts of interest, and appearances of impropriety,” writing that he “does not have jurisdiction to hear Mr. Trump’s arguments concerning the propriety of the New York trial.”

The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted Trump’s case, declined comment. Earlier Tuesday, the office sent a letter to the trial judge, Juan M. Merchan, objecting to Trump’s effort to delay post-trial decisions in the case while he was seeking to have the U.S. District Court in Manhattan step in.

Merchan is expected to rule soon on two key defense requests: Trump’s call for the judge to delay his Sept. 18 sentencing until after the November election, and his request that the judge overturn his conviction and dismiss the case in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Merchan has said he will rule Sept. 16 on Trump’s motion to overturn the verdict. His decision on delaying sentencing has been expected in the coming days.

Trump was convicted in May of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a $130,000 hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels, whose affair allegations threatened to disrupt his 2016 presidential run. Trump has denied her claim and said he did nothing wrong. His lawyers contend the case was tainted by violations of Trump’s constitutional rights and that the verdict is vitiated by the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling.

Falsifying business records is punishable by up to four years behind bars. Other potential sentences include probation or a fine.

Trump’s lawyers contend that sentencing Trump as scheduled, just two days after Merchan’s expected immunity decision, wouldn’t give him enough time to weigh next steps, including a possible appeal, if the judge rules to uphold the verdict.

They also argued a Sept. 18 sentencing, about seven weeks before Election Day, would be election interference. In a court filing last week, they raised the specter that Trump could be sent to jail just as early voting is getting underway.

Prosecutors have not staked a position on whether to delay sentencing, deferring to Merchan on an “appropriate post-trial schedule.” In their letter Tuesday, they said they were open to a schedule that allows “adequate time” to adjudicate Trump’s motion to overturn the verdict while also sentencing him “without unreasonable delay.”

Trump’s lawyers first asked the federal court to intervene last week, but their paperwork was kicked back because they hadn’t gotten the required clearance from Hellerstein to file it. Hours after they submitted papers Tuesday requesting Hellerstein’s permission to proceed, he issued his ruling denying it.

Before dissecting Trump’s immunity claims, Hellerstein dispatched quickly of the defense’s oft-repeated claims that Merchan had treated Trump unfairly — subjecting him to a gag order and refusing to delay the trial until after the Supreme Court ruled — because Merchan’s daughter is a Democratic political consultant.

Merchan last month rejected Trump’s latest request that he step aside from the case, saying Trump’s demand was a rehash “rife with inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims” about his ability to remain impartial. A state appeals court recently upheld the gag order.

“It would be highly improper for this Court to evaluate the issues of bias, unfairness or error in the state trial,” Hellerstein wrote. “Those are issues for the state appellate courts.”

Instead, he noted, Trump can pursue a state appeal or seek review from the U.S. Supreme Court, whose immunity ruling reins in prosecutions of ex-presidents for official acts and restricts prosecutors in pointing to official acts as evidence that a president’s unofficial actions were illegal.

Trump’s lawyers have argued that prosecutors rushed to trial instead of waiting for the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision, and that prosecutors erred by showing jurors evidence that should not have been allowed under the ruling, such as former White House staffers describing how Trump reacted to news coverage of the hush money deal and tweets he sent while president in 2018.